He stares down the barrel of a camera like a judge, implacable, hair and eyebrows wisped like a store wig. The left brow is higher, saying, Do you believe it? All of the crummy crap in the world, they decide to do this with your dollars? He has thinned. Toughened. There are fewer signs of White House meat, and the mouth that has puckered and parted with disdain at so many podiums is now long ...

Tonight, like many other nights, you are confronted with a life-altering decision. As the question begins to form in your mind, you feel your consciousness begin to splinter, your universe begin to shatter, and in each fragment, a different answer. "What should I watch?" In one universe, you're front and center in a movie theater, surrounded by a captivated audience, watching 250 Spider-people...

We’re halfway through 2023 and critics are slouching towards their Best Records Of The Year So Far lists. They’re rarely happy about it. If dicing releases every 12 months is arbitrary, then six months is labor on a factory line, wood chips for the content mill. But this year, I feel like they hate these lists more than usual. They’re having a hard time picking much. And maybe you are, too. P...

In Ari Aster’s 2016 short film C’est La Vie, Chester Crummings, a homeless man, speaks directly and combatively to camera about his life and society at large as he wanders the streets of LA, surviving, begging for change and casually murdering people. At one point, he says: “You know what Freud says about the nature of horror? He says it’s when the home becomes unhomelike. Unheimlich.”  In Sig...

This is the story of how I listened to this six-hour work in one sitting, and came closer to existential dread than I think I will ever want to. Ever.